The Core Knowledge Blog

Faced with student attrition and a financial crisis, Catholic schools have to reinvent themselves.   “The biggest threat that urban Catholic schools face is nostalgia,” John Eriksen, a Catholic schools superintendent from Paterson, New Jersey tells Time Magazine. ”We’ve been running these schools in a way that might have worked 30 or 40 years ago but doesn’t work now,” he says.  Catholic schools have been reinventing themselves by converting to charters, and forging partnerships with philanthropists and foundations in an effort to stem their decline, the magazine notes.

Nearly 1 in 5 Catholic schools in the U.S. has closed its doors this decade. To non-Catholics, this may not appear to be something worth worrying about. But parochial schools are one of the largest (if not the largest) alternatives to the American public-education system, and their steady decline inordinately affects urban low-income minorities who would otherwise be left at the mercy of public schools that have proven incapable of educating them.

At National Review Online, Sol Stern says the Time piece is “a welcome look at the plight of urban Catholic schools.” But Stern argues their decline has been “exacerbated by public-school reform schemes that have been oversold to the public and, ironically, cheered by many conservatives and businesspeople.”

In New York City, for example, the Catholic schools are competing for teachers with a public school system that now has unheard-of sums of money to spend. In just the past seven years, the city’s education budget has increased from $12.7 billion to $22 billion. Teacher salaries have risen 43 percent across the board in six years, passing the $100,000 top-salary threshold for the first time. Ten years ago, the gap between the city’s top salaries for Catholic-school teachers and public-school teachers was around $28,000. It’s now $50,000. Catholic schools find themselves stuck on a treadmill in which they either have to raise salaries even higher — and pass the costs on to students’ families — or lose more teachers to the public schools.

The Time piece notwithstanding, it’s mystifing at how little attention Catholic schools get given their long history of effectively educating poor urban children.  According to the National Catholic Education Association, 99% of Catholic secondary school students graduate, with 97% going on to college. And scale?  Reform darling KIPP runs 66 public schools serving just over 16,000 students.   Catholic schools serving 25 times more children have closed down this decade.   Over a thousand schools, serving nearly half a million students, nearly all of whom, one assumes, went back into public schools, which have failed to produce anything like the results posted by Catholic schools.